SEO Audit (price of a coffee)Starting at $1 →
Technical SEO

What is the Noindex Tag?

The noindex tag prevents Google from indexing a specific page in its search results.

The noindex tag () tells search engines not to include a page in their index.

When to use it?

  • Admin or login pages
  • Internal search result pages
  • Thank-you pages after form submission
  • Duplicate or temporary content
  • Staging/test pages

Difference from robots.txt

  • robots.txt: Prevents crawling
  • noindex: Allows crawling but prevents indexing

Warning

If a page is blocked by robots.txt AND has a noindex tag, Google will never see the noindex tag because it cannot crawl the page.

SEO Impact

Using noindex on irrelevant pages prevents diluting your site's overall quality in Google's index.